Preflight check.

I saved a fly the other day. It was drowning in the fountain near the U.S. Capitol building. I was sitting beside the fountain feeling sorry for myself, when as "luck" would have it this helpless fly was, seemingly, pushed right to me, and at just that moment I looked down to find it struggling for its life, with no possibility of saving itself without help. I reached down and scooped the poor thing out of the water and put it on the tip of my finger. I held it up to the bright sky to have a closer look at it while it was recomposing itself. After a few moments of what seem to be self-diagnostics and a preflight check, it flew away.

For a few seconds, I have to admit, that I had somewhat of a God complex. Then I realized that the universe sent me that fly to save my life. It also helped me to better understand how to save a life.

When I saw that helpless fly drowning, I had more pity for the fly then I did for my own petty sorrows. It helped me to realize that even though circumstances sometimes seem highly unfavorable, sometimes fate has an entirely inconceivable ending written for just the right person, at the just the right time, to come along to read.


One of my Uncles once told me a story about a little boy who was combing the beach picking up starfish and throwing them back into the ocean, when someone asked him what he was doing. The boy said, "I'm saving starfish." Then the person told the little boy that it didn't matter, that he couldn't save them all. And the little boy held up the starfish he held in his hand and answered, "Mister, to this one it does!"

Preflight check
by
Michael Champion

The birth of Patriotism?

Captain James Jack, a Charlotte Militia Captain and tavern owner, risked his life to ride to Philadelphia in June of 1775, more than a year before the U.S. Declaration of Independence was drafted, to deliver documents to the Continental Congress that expressed Charlotte's call for liberty from the tyrannical British Empire and its king George iii. This act may have been a prelude to the greatest document in American history in which the second sentence declares,

"We hold these truths to be self-evident,  that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."